Under the Moons of Mars by John Joseph Adams Page A

hundred feet high, and is allowed inside by a wizened old man. Carter is able to read the man’s mind, though the man has no inkling of this. The man tells Carter that the building is an atmosphere plant that supplies air to all of Barsoom, and that the doors can be opened only through the use of a secret code, and that this code is revealed to only two men on Barsoom at any given time. At this point Carter reads the man’s mind and learns the code. As the two of them say good night, Carter again reads the man’s mind and learns that the man intends to murder him in his sleep, since the man now suspects that Carter has learned too much. Carter escapes the building, and much later, when the atmosphere plant fails, he’s able to use his knowledge of the secret code to spring the doors and save all of Barsoom. Our next tale shows us this key event in Barsoomian history from an entirely different point of view—that of a very unusual and talented young member of the Warhoon.

A TINKER OF WARHOON
    BY TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
“G et up!” snarled three-armed Gar Kofan, silhouetted against the light of Barsoom’s two moons.
    Kaz slowly rose, brushing sand off his gun belt. “It is foolish to stand when someone is shooting at you,” he said sullenly.
    “They weren’t shooting at you,” Gar Kofan said, cuffing him lightly on the side of the head. “It was a warning shot. We’ve found the Jedwar’s party.”
    Kaz looked back toward their wagon. He’d rather be back inside, poring over the insides of an electric range finder.
    His people, the Warhoons, were unpredictable and violent, Kaz had always felt. Even more violent than their mortal enemies, the Tharks. They’d spent the last few days watching men fight to the death in the arena in the ruins of what had once been some glorious city. And now they were moving across the wastes once more, looking for new victims and plunder.
    Kaz hated this. He’d rather be back in Warhoon.
    He’d rather be fixing things.
    Machines didn’t trick you. Machines didn’t have an inscrutable warrior code that always seemed to end with bloodshed. Machines didn’t attack you for accidentally bumping into them.
Or yell at you for ducking when bullets flew.
    They could cuff him as much as they wanted, or call him coward. He wasn’t about to stand still and be shot.
    Any other young runt of a Warhoon with a single name like Kaz would have been killed long ago for thinking this way. But unlike any of his kind, Kaz could fix things—weapons in particular—and so he was tolerated by his tribe.
    But more importantly, he was tolerated by Gar Kofan .
    Gar Kofan did that mostly because he couldn’t give up his only apprentice. Gar Kofan was old, and one of his eyes was milky white and blind, from an old duel. He stood hunched over, and he was missing an entire arm, leaving him with only three. His remaining hands now shook whenever he tried to fix small machines, and it was difficult for him to see small things, even when they were right in front of him.
    Kaz knew that Gar Kofan needed him more than he needed Gar Kofan. Gar Kofan was really a warrior, not a tinker, and the machines often frustrated and stumped him and left him cursing and throwing them against the wall. Kaz was the far better tinker, because he understood the machines.
    With Gar Kofan’s past reputation as a fighter and his skill (he had taken the name of Kofan in the usual manner: by killing a Kofan Jedwar), they had built a good life in Warhoon. And so, although Gar Kofan had only three arms and was going blind, Gar Kofan would cheerfully kill anyone who threatened Kaz.
    Gar Kofan had turned to tinkering with machines and fixing the electric range finders on rifles after he’d lost his arm. He had taught Kaz all he knew, since the day two years ago when he found Kaz loitering around his wagon and asking questions about how everything worked.
    At first, Gar Kofan had thrown him out of the wagon and told him to go away. But